For one thing, civilians have also borne the brunt of wars effects. While being in combat is terrible, civilians face the depredations of enemy troops, rape, pillaging, starvation, expulsion and exposure. Militaries long ago figured out that they needed to provide good conditions for their troops in order to be effective. The military will provide food, medical care, transportation, etc., that civilians may not receive at all, or only after the fighting man’s needs are seen to.
Righto.
In most wars thru history the civilian deaths vastly exceeded the military dead.
In fact, one could develop a quantitative analysis of various wars by determining the ratio of military vs. civilian deaths. The US has been quite lucky in this regard. All three of the wars fought on US soil would come in extraordinarily low on this scale.
Well, that’s a whole different argument since there were both civillian men and civillian women, though of course they suffered in different ways if the military failed to protect them. Still, women getting raped, or forced into servitude during wars, isn’t a result of men being sexist bastards, it’s a result of humans being evil. The same men that were out raping the enemy’s women were trying to stop the enemy from raping their women. It was a tactic of war, based on practicality getting the better of everyones’ morality.